Web and mobile typography continued to boom in 2012, with more and more typefaces making their way directly to the browser.

Thanks in no small part to the lovely nerds at Google, web fonts that the consumer doesn’t have to download are now legitimately A Thing. Google’s ongoing Web Fonts project is now home to more than 600 typefaces, all of them free and Internet-friendly.

Also, we’ve got the @font-face rule in CSS3, which makes displaying new and interesting faces directly in the browser much easier on everyone.

Also, you can check out last year’s mobile/web typography round-up if you’re particularly interested in watching trends change over time — or if you want to pick up some still-hot free typefaces for your work in 2013.

This @font-face compatible type family (also available from Google Web Fonts) is as versatile as it is legible. For those of you over the age of 25, Noticia will be instantly recognizable as a loving tribute to the news magazine faces of yore. Its ample x-height and sturdy serifs make long blocks of text in those meaty investigative pieces a pleasure to read. Also, Noticia gives you a break in the interior curves of round characters. “While this break makes some interesting forms at large sizes, their true purpose is to help make the counterforms more open at small sizes by allowing straighter stems,” say the creators.

Rounded fonts are one of the design trends we’ve been seeing around the web and various app marketplaces lately. Legible and playful, they’re in keeping with the lighthearted new school of consumer digital products. Bariol is sans and rounded in one, with pleasant weights in regular and italic faces. Plus, the Bariol icon set will greatly expand the vocabulary of your app’s design language. While the font’s creator asks for you to pay whatever you like for the full set, you can also shout out via Twitter or Facebook to get free downloads.

Poly was intended to be an academic’s love letter to a South American indigenous language called Wayuunaiki. It ended up being a critically acclaimed Latin serifs and one of the best Google Web Fonts, period. This @font-face compatible typeface is a workhorse for running text, an elegant and subtle substitute for the more common serifs on the web. Plus, its high x-height and abbreviated ascenders make it great for small sizes, even for mobile web use.

Inspired by a World War II Italian poster, Quando is a casual serif with the curves to hold your interest in headlines and the low-contrast to look good at small sizes in running text on a mobile device. We’re sad that it doesn’t come with a bold, italic, or other weights to round out the family, but we like where the type designer was going with this.

So, you want to play around with a sexy, swashy Didone and you’re not too picky about web compatibility? Have we got a font for you. Valentina contains more glyphs than you will ever possibly need — including lowercase alternates and fancy ligatures. This highly decorative face will add a heavy-handed touch of “I worked in print” class to your magaziney apps and single-page sites.

Dingbats have been aching for an update of this caliber for decades. In 800 glyphs, the creators of Erler Dingbats give us the arrows and pointy-fingers we’re used to and more than a few refreshingly modern shapes as well. There’s a Nintendo Wii controller in there, for chrissake. These quick-and-dirty glyphs make sweet U.I. elements for icons, maps, forms, infographics, and even logos. Note to Photoshop purists: You’ll need to use a Glyphs window (such as appears in InDesign) to access the full Dingbat character set.

Gleegoo’s name is just about as awkward as it gets, but what it lacks in elegant nomenclature it makes up for in svelte slab serifs and delicate letterforms. It’s a single-font typeface, so don’t look to Gleegoo for all your typesetting needs. Still, as the web rides out the slab serif trend to its faux-Old West grave, it’s nice to see screen-appropriate additions such as this friendly face.

Also available as a Google Web Font, Sofia is a flirty girl with a retro vibe. This upright script is unapologetically feminine, with enough curlicues to confound even the most sadistic roller-coaster designer. And its numeral set is a treat unto itself. Great for logotypes and headlines.

If you want your site or app to recall the golden age of advertising, look no further than Oregano. This typeface of two fonts (regular and italic) is based on the work of Rand Holub, the guy who literally wrote the book on hand-lettering for commercial design and hand-lettered logos. Oregano is casual and fun without being cartoonish.

This hand-lettered oddball is based on the poster art of São Paulo. “I saw at the start some potential for a typeface that could recall the feelings of the writing used day-to-day in my city’s informal communication and developed it into a typeface family,” writes creator Marcelo Magalhães. The solid font can be combined with shadow, outline, and “sketch” versions of the typeface for different effects; we like it best in all caps. Reminds us of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Vintage is the new modern, and old-timey type is everywhere on the web these days. Montserrat will feed your need for old-school type. This geometric sans takes its inspiration from signs in the historic district of Buenos Aires. It’s available in regular and bold weights with lowercase alternates and an uppercase underlined version.

Adobe knows you designers are forcing yourselves into development, and with Source Code, it’s making it a more pleasant experience for everyone. This legible monospace has distinct glyphs for capital I, lowercase l, and the numeral 1. We cannot stress how awesome that is for those who work with code; that announcement alone got an applause break at the Adobe developer conference.

Colophon: All type samples use quotations from the classic newspaper film His Girl Friday, starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant.

In our yearly roundups of what was awesome and what sucked about 2011, we cannot overlook one of our favorite verticals for nerding out: typography.

The past year has brought quite a few interesting developments in web and mobile typography. As a plethora of technologies make typography on the web a lot better year over year, we are able to grow in the typefaces and tools we use.

And as mobile devices, operating systems and displays improve, we get to have more fun when designing for smartphones and tablets, too.

Here are a few of our and others’ picks for the best mobile and web fonts of 2011, including a few freebies you can download right now.

Sero Web brings legibility and distinction to the table. This face, which spent seven long years in development, combines elements of an American grotesque and humanist sans serifs. Fit for a pro, the face comes in eight weights and includes an expansive set of characters as well as Cyrillic and Greek characters.

Malabar has been commercially available for at least a year, but it sprang to life in 2011 on the website of German agency Das Fork. Its angular serifs and strong strokes were designed (and later tweaked for the web) by Dan Reynolds, who received multiple awards for the face from the Type Directors Club.

Clear and legible but still playful enough for larger headlines, Good Mobile brings developers and designers a sturdy cast of characters for smartphones and tablets. Specifically optimized for use in iOS applications, Good Mobile features upright forms with straight-sided gothic/grotesk strokes. FontShop said this face has become its own go-to for mobile work.

Four Ubuntu fonts made an appearance in the October 2010 release of Ubuntu 10.10. However, in April 2011 additional fonts and expanded language coverage were introduced. Since then, the full Ubuntu font family has become a pleasing choice for digital media, as it is manually hinted for clarity on desktop and mobile screens. This sans serif is free-as-in-freedom as well as free-as-in-beer, which gives us even more reasons to love it.

We loved this humanist-grotesk hybrid so much, we wrote an entire post about it. Others aren’t so appreciative, calling Roboto a “four-headed Frankenfont”. But even its critics give props where props are due: Google’s taking the time and resources to develop a mobile-specific face earned the company universal kudos. And the face looks great on the company’s Android devices.

These two faces we’re throwing in the mix just for fun. On the skinny side, we have Ostrich Sans, a long, slender face that brings versatile variations for logos and web headlines. On the heavier side, we bring you Dock11, a deliciously thick geometric sans that has the necessary weight to make a substantial impression.